Browser Speed Comparisons

@ 2005/02/14

There is a speed war on the web. Browsers compete on many fronts; security, standards support, features and speed. Most people are aware of which major browser fails on three of these, but one of them is still open for grabs. Speed.

Many organisations and users try to claim that their browser is the fastest. The Opera site claims that Opera is The Fastest Browser on Earth!. The Mozilla site claims that Firefox 1.0 empowers you to browse faster (faster than what?). Mozilla itself is quoted as being an alternative to Microsoft IE and it's faster to boot. Apple's Safari pages claim that Safari loads pages more quickly than any other Mac web browser (although they failed to show any results for Opera, and their charts fail to show results for pages that contain images). Internet Explorer users often claim that they use it because of its speed, as the alternatives take longer to start and load pages.